Who Will Watch the Watchers?

First came the mob – the toxic mix of hard-core trouble-makers, self-styled anarchists, and regular old drunken yobs, who ripped downtown Vancouver apart.

(I confess, I’m frustrated with the number of people in denial – including Vancouver’s chief of police – who keep insisting that the post-Stanley Cup riot had nothing to do with hockey or hockey fans. Nonsense. Yes, there was a group of people who came to downtown Vancouver that night prepared to make trouble, whether for “political” reasons or to get themselves “famous” on Facebook and YouTube, for more amorphous, inchoate, motives. But there’s something about the mix of testosterone, adrenalin, beer, and tribal identification that fuels these post hockey-game riots, in places as diverse as Montreal, Edmonton, and Vancouver. When, after all, was the last post-CFL riot you remember? NHL hockey inflames national emotions and passions like nothing else, and seems to give Canadians are weird sense of permission to behave badly in public like no other activity. That doesn’t mean that all hockey fans, or even most hockey fans, are yobs. But please, let’s not pretend that hockey had nothing to do with triggering Vancouver’s giant street-party-run-riot, or that those spoiled, entitled, tantruming kids, swept up in all that alcohol-fueled emotion, weren’t wound up first by the energy and the disappointment of the game.)

There are plenty of sociological explanations for the kind of primitive destructive impulses that swept downtown Vancouver that night – but no excuses. It’s no wonder that people coast-to-coast are angry and embarrassed, Vancouverites most of all.

The idiots and thugs who trashed downtown Vancouver weren’t trying to avoid observation. If anything, they were playing to and for the cameras, performing, mugging, and stunting for the hundreds of onlookers who were recording their antics. Some of those people were professional journalists, of course. But hundreds more were “ordinary” citizens, who were using their cell phone cameras to record history.

Did the audience reaction help to fuel and sustain the riot? In many cases, I suspect it did. Instead of being ashamed that people were watching them, instead of being embarrassed by their own bad behaviour, as you might expect, some of the rioters seemed to thrive on the attention, on the idea that they were getting famous, that they were part of some historic moment. The onlookers only fed their egos, their craving for attention. To them, this was something to brag about on Facebook or Twitter, a way of puffing up their street cred.

The result? We now have an unprecedented on-line archive of Wednesday night’s bad, bad behaviour, a virtual rogues’ gallery of jerks, creeps, and dimwits.

It’s understandable that people should want to make use of that digital database to punish and shame the perpetrators of the mess and the mayhem – in real time. And arguably, the (alleged) rioters in question gave up any right to privacy when they took to the public streets to commit acts of public mischief and vandalism. “Outing” them may seem like a valuable public service – a metaphorical return to the days when we put miscreants in the stocks in the public square and pelted them with rotten produce.

And yet, something about all the righteous on-line baying for retribution makes me queasy. It’s one thing for police and courts to investigate, to lay charges, to conduct fair trials with all the evidence weighed in the balance. An on-line lynch mob is something very different indeed – with a tendency to forget that people are legally innocent until proven guilty.

Many of these photos are of very poor quality – taken in bad lighting, under raucous conditions, by non-professional photographers using non-professional camera equipment. It’s not always easy to make out faces, to confirm identities. And pictures, even videos, capture only moments in time – it’s easy to take those images out of their full narrative context, especially when emotions are already running high.

Another issue? Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act forbids the mainstream media from printing any image or information that might serve to identify an alleged – or convicted – young offender. But the courts have never had much luck applying those laws to the Web, or to citizen vigilantes. What are the odds, and the dangers, that youths who are entitled to protection under Canada’s law could lose that right in these circumstances? Or that they already have?

One alleged Vancouver rioter, an elite 17-year-old water polo player, has already been outed by the mainstream press, who printed, not just his name, and the name of his team, but his parents’ names, their professions, and the value of their house – and this, all before the young man in question has been legally identified or charged with anything.

But there’s another, subtler, point here. We are already under surveillance much of the time in this country, from private and police security cameras. Since 9/11, many of our traditional attitudes towards that culture of surveillance have shifted, so that we positively seem to welcome being under Orwellian observation. But now, is that surveillance culture going to permeate our social media networks as well?

Blogger and social media observer Alexandra Samuel has posted several interesting essays on this question this week.

“‘Taking the law into your own hands’ doesn’t have to involve administering vigilante justice with a gun,” she wrote. “It can look like people creating their own Wanted posters. It can look like employers making decisions based on online information instead of criminal records. It can look like organizing a mass, volunteer corps of police informants — exactly what is going on today. We have seen Big Brother, and he is us.”

We’re a long, long, long way, of course, from the Stasi culture of East Germany, or from the world of Mao’s Culture Revolution, police states that oppressed the people with the complicity of their neighbours. But in the matrix of the reaction to Vancouver, you can see the seeds of how that kind of informant culture can develop.

Few people are wholly immune to the siren lure of mob psychology – and you don’t always need to be torching a car or breaking a shop window, to fall under its spell.

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